A modified symplectic discontinuous Galerkin method for acoustic and elastic wave simulations

Abstract

Numerically solving seismic wave equations is vital to large-scale forward modeling and full waveform inversion. In this paper, a new modified symplectic discontinuous Galerkin (MSDG) method is proposed to solve the acoustic and elastic equations. The MSDG method employs a symmetric interior penalty Galerkin formulation as the space discretization. The time discretization is based on a modified symplectic partitioned Runge–Kutta scheme with minimized phase error. Thus, the MSDG method has the advantages of high accuracy, being flexible to deal with complex geometric boundaries and internal structures, and stable for long time simulations. The numerical stability conditions, dispersion and dissipation are investigated in detail for the MSDG method. To validate the method, we carry out several numerical examples for solving the acoustic and elastic wave equations in various media. The numerical results show that the MSDG method can effectively suppress the numerical dispersion and is suitable for wavefield simulations.